


Keep Trying

by aohatsu



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, M/M, Mpreg, Rape Recovery, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-11
Updated: 2020-07-11
Packaged: 2021-03-03 23:35:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,675
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24993955
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aohatsu/pseuds/aohatsu
Summary: It isn’t strange for him to remember things from the past seventy years or more at random; a bright light, a soft sound, a smell—a taste. He’s constantly remembering things he’d forgotten, lost to the horror of the chair and the straps and the freezing cold of the cryotube.They’re not often good memories, and this one hadn’t been either.He isn’t sure what it was.He can’t get the sound of a child crying out of his head.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Hydra Agents (past), James "Bucky" Barnes/Sam Wilson
Comments: 6
Kudos: 113
Collections: Nonconathon 2020





	Keep Trying

**Author's Note:**

  * For [seinmit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/seinmit/gifts).



> Takes place after Endgame, assuming Bucky and Sam end up becoming best friends and partners. I'm really looking forward to _The Falcon & the Winter Soldier_ if you can't tell. Please go destroy the remnants of Hydra together boys. ♥
> 
> There is very little actual non-con in here. I'm sorry! I hope you enjoy it anyway. :)

James slams his metal arm against the door hard enough to bend the metal straight through, wrenching the bracketed locks off.  
  
“Damn, man, there’s a thing called subtlety and you punched straight through it.”

Sam follows him through the door when James pushes through it, the scream of the hinges loud in his ears. This door hasn’t been opened since the Widow exposed seventy percent of Hydra’s dealings to the general public. James, for better or worse, hadn’t remembered it existed until a week ago, a nightmare bringing the memories and knowledge to the forefront of his mind.

It isn’t strange for him to remember things from the past seventy years or more at random; a bright light, a soft sound, a smell—a taste. He’s constantly remembering things he’d forgotten, lost to the horror of the chair and the straps and the freezing cold of the cryotube.

They’re not often good memories, and this one hadn’t been either.

He isn’t sure what it was.

He can’t get the sound of a child crying out of his head.

“Yo, Bucky. _James_ ,” Sam says, again, and he should be quieter except they both know that nothing is here except rats and dust-covered terminals, folders and files left behind by the Hydra operatives who’d run for their lives at the first sign that they’d chosen the losing side.

“What?” James answers, not looking at him. He’s glancing around in the dark. Sam has turned on a flashlight, and Redwing has flown in ahead of them, scanning the abandoned office-slash-laboratory. James isn’t sure if there’s a chair here. There might be. If there is, he’ll rip it apart like the rest.

“What are we looking for, exactly? I’m here to help, but I need some information if you’re expecting me to know what to do.”

The problem is that he doesn’t know. It’s all a fucking mess in his head.

“There was something important here.”

“Any idea what kind of something?”

Crippling pain in his stomach, his hips. Hands grasping at the walls and blank, nameless faces holding him down as someone thrusts inside him, grunting like an animal. Pulling his head back by his hair, holding on tightly so that another could push into his mouth, thick and choking, the smell of sweat and piss in his nose, the taste of it on his tongue until the urge to hurl nearly overwhelmed the words keeping him from objecting.

“No.”

A sense of desperation.

Something.

His. His. His.

Something.

Something was important. Something he wanted.

Something they made him forget.

Sam doesn’t need to know the particulars of every memory he gets back; the rape and torture is hardly the worst of it when he remembers choking the life out of innocent women and children every night. Besides, it isn’t like Sam doesn’t already know. He’s woken up next to James often enough to have a good idea of the nightmares; he’s seen the tape that went out with the rest of it, the one that had James recorded as Hydra soldier after Hydra soldier fucked him full of their come, knotting him to keep him docile during his heats, to keep him attached to whatever handler he’d been assigned to for his temporary bouts of consciousness.

Sam knows.

He doesn’t need to hear more about it.

“Hey, Redwing sees something down that hall over there,” Sam says, frowning under his goggles at whatever input he’s getting from the bird.

James turns to look down the hallway. It’s long, dark, empty. He starts moving that way, Sam staying close behind him. The red, white, and blue wings on his new Captain America themed costume—because that is what it is, a goddamn _costume_ , whatever Sam wants to call it—folding closer in against his back beneath Steve’s old shield.

James tightens his metal fist, all Wakandan vibranium and stronger than anything Hydra ever had to torture him with.

There’s nothing down this hallway that he can’t deal with, that Sam can’t help him destroy.

He’ll never find peace, but he can damn well get rid of every last physical taunt that calls out to him in his nightmares.

They stop at a metal door, triple locked and equipped with a retinal scanner. Redwing is hovering next to it, waiting for them to break it open—so James does, lifts his fist and punches through the lock just the same as he’d done to the door before it, and the one before that, and the outside entrance.

Sam shakes his head, “One day, you’ll learn the art of subtlety. I get that that’s not today, but seriously.”

“It’s a retinal scanner, what else were we supposed to do?”

“No, no, your method works fine. I just suspect you like punching things and would’ve done that even if we did have a key.”

He has a point. James pushes through the room. The first thing he notices is the cold, like frozen metal under ice. Like stepping into a cryotube, the imprint of a hard fist pushing him in whether he wants it or not. The blood in his body hardening into painful ice as he screams.

He bumps into a table, knocking a vile aside. It smashes onto the ground, leaking blue liquid onto the stone slabs that make up the floor inside this prison.

The left wall has three cryotubes staring down at them.

Sam slips a red-gloved hand into James’—the real one, not the vibranium gift from a princess too brilliant to know any better. Giving an arm like that to a murderer, a man with blood dripping from his fists no matter how many times he cleans them off, no matter how hard he scrubs or squeezes his eyes shut and turns away.

The last years he’d spent as the soldier, they’d controlled him so easily.

He hadn’t even wanted to try and remember.

“Bucky. There’s somebody in that one. The one on the left.”

He swallows. There hadn’t been any more winter soldiers; they’d tried it, they’d failed. That’s what Siberia had been about. There couldn’t have been more.

Except that there could have been.

He pulls away from Sam’s hand, approaches the cryotube—and then frowns.

It’s a kid.

He puts a hand on the glass, shivering at the cold touch but wiping it off to see more clearly. The shape is barely visible, but it’s obvious enough. There’s a fucking kid in cryo; a _child_ , frozen and left like it’d been deemed unimportant.

Fuck.

_Fuck._

“We have to wake it up.”

“The hell, man? What if it’s crazy? Hydra was nuts. We should take it back to somebody who can handle this.”

Wakanda could handle it.

Bucky can’t.

He turns and slams his fist against the control box that he knows with utter sudden certainty controls the tube.

Sam curses behind him, wings stretching as he grabs his shield like he’ll have any ability to fight in a room this small with those giant ass wings and that boomerang of a shield. Besides, James knows well enough—someone right out of cryo is in no state to put up a fight.

The glass opens; a gust of freezing air fills the room, and the sound of metal grinding against metal hits them as the lid falls to the floor with a clang. The kid falls out of the cryotube, still unconscious, still freezing, ice and water clinging to their skin.

It’s a girl.

“That’s a damn _toddler_ , what the fuck. Every time you think Hydra can’t get worse, they surprise you,” Sam mutters, dropping to his knees to help James pick the kid up and turn her around. She’s naked; James pulls off his outer uniform vest and then takes off the dark blue sweater he’d been wearing underneath it, wrapping her up in it as much as he’s able. It’s too big, but it isn’t big enough to reach her feet. It’ll have to do.

His heart is beating wildly in his chest.

He can almost hear the sound of voices in his head, the order, and the recognition of it.

_He’ll be easier to control with an alpha to pay heel to._

Being pushed down in his cell, held down by dozens of hands on top of cold, debilitating words that leave him unable to fight back, unable to move as they force themselves on top of him, into him, over and over again. He’d been an alpha; forced into submission.

_Fuck him until his secondary gender undergoes the change._

The mindless rutting, thrusting their cocks into him until they were able to knot, using him without a care. His body finally adjusting; emitting the slick of an omega, his hole widening, his scent shifting into something sweeter. His entire body changing as an act of survival to protect him.

_Impregnate him._

Filling him with so much come it covered him everywhere. His ass, his back and his thighs, dripping down his legs for days until they’d finally allow him to stand under the cold hose, cleaning it off only to repeat the entire experience once a month, every time he had a heat and wasn’t in cryostasis, protected by his own prison of ice and frozen time.

_We’ll see if this serum is viable through the soldier’s offspring._

He’d had a baby.

Oh, God. It can’t be fucking true, but it is.

Dark brown eyes on light skin, with even darker hair. A loud, warbling cry as he held it close to his chest, covered in blood and amniotic fluid as they waited for someone to come, to help. As he prayed they wouldn’t.

No one had come when he’d started to groan, to gasp with the pain of a baby pushing to get out of his body. He hadn’t screamed, or cried. He’d pushed her out onto the cold tiled floor of a cell, wrapped her in the single rough blanket in the room—material he’d ripped from the flat mattress—and held her in his arms for hours before they realized he’d given birth at all.

He’d run his hands over her skin, wet and dirty but soft and new and somehow special.

She’d been his.

And then they’d taken her.

He could have seen her again. They could have given her back, let him feed her at his breast.

He doesn’t know if he’d made milk. He doesn’t know if he’d ever seen her again.

He doesn’t remember.

“Sam,” he gasps because he can barely breathe. The girl twitches in his arms and Sam takes the bulk of her weight as James threatens to fall to the ground.

“Hey, James, hey, stay with me, man, I need you to walk out of here with me. We’ll get on the jet, head back to base. The kid’ll be fine. You’ll be fine.”

He forces himself to breathe.

“She’s mine.”

Sam breathes with him, grips his forearm tight.

“You remember that? You’re sure?”

His chest hurts. His stomach feels like it’s twisting in seven different directions.

“She’s mine,” he repeats. And again, “She’s mine.”

“Okay. Okay. Yeah, cool. We—we’ve got her. We’re taking her with us. Come on, get up, let’s go.”

Sam pulls him up. He half carries him down the hall, the girl in his arms. James takes one step, then another, and another.

He can remember the swell of his stomach. The burning hunger that the pills and the rations hadn’t been able to fill. The punishments when he vomited, wasting the extra rations they’d given him at the doctor’s orders. The splatter of blood, of fluid at his feet in his cell, followed by a struggle to breathe as pain rushed through him.

A little boy’s terrified face as he pulled the trigger.

He couldn’t be a parent.

They took her away.

He couldn’t be her mother.

_They took her away._

He grabs a chair just before they leave the facility, throwing it against a wall hard enough to crack the stone.

Deep breaths.

“James, come on. She needs help. Your daughter needs help.”

He follows Sam. Follows him to the jeep and climbs in. Takes the girl in his arms while Sam gets behind the wheel and starts to drive, faster than the speed limit on these back roads allow; not fast enough.

She’s cold, but the ice has melted and slid off of her. She’s wrapped up in his sweater.

Her fingers are twitching.

He tries not to hold her too tightly.

“She looks young. Two or three, maybe,” Sam says, after a long silence. James doesn’t know how long. Minutes. Hours. Somewhere in between.

He doesn’t know how old she is. Doesn’t know when he gave birth to her. When he conceived.

“Cryo,” he says. “I don’t know when. I only remember—”

_The winter soldier program was a failure! They could not be controlled!_

_Then we will try a new method of birthing a winter soldier._

“It was after. The other soldiers. This was… it was after.”

Sam is good at talking when he wants, when James needs someone to talk.

He also knows when James needs the quiet.

They drive for an hour until they get into the city. Their plane is waiting for them—one phone call to Shuri and she had it arranged, already asking for explanations, details, and the kid’s vitals. They’ll be ready when they land in Wakanda in another hour.

Sam runs into an overpriced gift shop to buy a small set of blue-and-white pajamas with a white-haired princess on the shirt and snowflakes decorated across everything else. James doesn’t comment while they’re struggling to dress her, but Sam shrugs and says, “Seemed relevant. They had a Captain America themed one if you’d rather—”

“Shut up,” he answers instantly, and huffs at Sam’s stupid grin in reply.

She ends up finally waking up on the plane.

Her eyelashes flutter, first. Her hands fist into the material of the pajamas and the airplane blanket covering her. James is still holding her, careful not to hold her too tightly but unable to quite let her go.

James can feel her heart stutter, then quicken. She goes tense in his arms. She opens her eyes.

She relaxes.

He stares at her, and she stares back.

“Hey,” he says, finally, into the dark and quiet of the plane. His voice hitches on the word.

She squirms closer to his chest, maybe seeking the warmth. Maybe she recognizes him after all, or maybe she just knows that he’s safe the way that he knows she’s his child. Maybe she knows that he’s her mother, the omega that carried her, gave birth to her, held her alone for hours and struggled to keep her, fight for her until those familiar words bore into his head and the chair stole her away from even his memory.

She kicks out her foot from beneath the blanket, and he tucks it back under.

Sam is watching from his seat next to James.

“I’m going to try to make this okay,” he says.

“She looks healthy. That’s something,” Sam murmurs. “You’ll, uh, need to give her a name.”

He doesn’t need to say it out loud. Whatever name Hydra called her isn’t one James wants her to keep.

“Rebecca.”

Sam nods. “Good name. And you know my mom’s about to go crazy for those big brown eyes of hers. They look just like yours.”

James mouth curls into a smirk. Sam is right. She does have his eyes. Brown hair, brown eyes, pale skin. She looks just like him. She's already falling back to sleep. James had always been exhausted coming out of cryo. They'll be in Wakanda soon. She'll get seen. She'll be fine.

Sam slings an arm over James’ shoulder, curling in close. “It’s gonna be alright, James. We’ll figure it out.”

James breathes. He’s not sure that’s true, but—

He’ll keep trying to make it okay, for Rebecca, for Sam, for what little of Bucky he has left.

He’ll keep trying.


End file.
